Social cohesion and climate change: a workshop for young Arab entrepreneurs

From 25 to 25 April 2013, the UNESCO Office in Beirut in partnership with Berytech will organize a 2-day regional workshop in Altcity (Lebanon) on “Youth Innovation, Social Inclusion and Social Responsibility of Arab Entrepreneurs at the Time of Climate Change”.

The workshop aims to provide young Arab entrepreneurs with a unique opportunity to learn, get inspired from and connect to regional and international experiences linking social cohesion, climate challenge response and entrepreneurship.

The Arab region, which includes 19 Member States and represents a complex variety of social development, contributes, as other regions in the world do, to the degradation of the environment. Consequently, the workshop will propose to explore a regional approach to influence collectively policy change which promotes social inclusion of all categories of population, and in particular young people, at times of climate change in the Arab region.

Through presentations, working groups and plenary discussions, the following issues will be addressed:

Social responsibility of business leaders

Influencing collectively social inclusion at the time of climate change

Social inclusion and youth engagement in ecological response

Why and how to make entrepreneurship more ecological?

How to make social venture more business oriented?

Making business plans more socially inclusive and more responsive to climate change?

For UNESCO, global environmental change gives rise to ethical challenges that need to be grasped within a framework of critical thinking. It must be recognized essentially as a social process. Thus, social impact of the climate change is identified as a research priority of UNESCO’s intergovernmental Programme on Management of Social Transformations (MOST). This will also be the theme of the next World Social Science Report which will be published in the second half of 2013.